Steyn on Mumbai

As usual, Steyn is brilliant. Here is the problem in a nutshell:

This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

The problem with the response to incidents like Mumbai, or London a couple years back or even to a certain extent the American "War on Terrorism" is that we still view the individual incidents themselves as if they are crimes. Of course killing someone is a crime, but our opponents view it as a war and as long as we continue to look at the matters as individual crimes rather than battles in the war for the future of the world, we are ceding the battleground.